On-premises data gateway January update is now available

We are excited to announce that we have just released the January update for the On-premises data gateway. Here are some of the things that we would like to highlight with this month’s release:

PowerShell commands for managing the on-premises data gateway are now published to the PowerShell Gallery in beta.

On-premises data gateway administrators can configure their gateways to control the number of mashup engine containers that can run in parallel.

The on-premises data gateway now includes the January version of the mashup engine.

You can download this new version from the link below and continue reading for more details about each enhancement.

PowerShell gateway commands

We are happy to announce that we have released the beta for the on-premises data gateway PowerShell Cmdlets to the public PowerShell gallery.

The PowerShell commands let you perform the following operations:

Retrieve the list of gateway clusters available for a user

Retrieve the list of gateway instances registered in a cluster, as well as their online or offline status

Modify the enable/disable status for a gateway instance within a cluster, as well as other gateway properties

Delete a gateway

Note that you don’t need to be on the same machine where the gateway is installed to use those commands.

To run the PowerShell commands, you need to take the following steps:

In PowerShell, make sure you have latest version of the PowerShellGet module by running the below command. You need to do this once on your machine. Make sure to restart the PowerShell console afterwards.

For more information about those commands and about high availability capabilities and gateway clusters, please check our documentation here.

Control the number of mashup engine containers

As you probably know, mashup engines are the components that run your queries, extract the data and load it into the data model. They are part of the on-premise gateway structure, and they are the same components that run in the Power BI desktop as well as the Power BI service.

On-premise gateway admins can now control the number of containers running simultaneously on the gateway machine. The more of those containers running, the more queries will run concurrently through the gateway.

Here are the steps to change this configuration:

On the gateway machine, open the file: [Program Files]\On-premises data gateway\Microsoft.PowerBI.DataMovement.Pipeline.GatewayCore.dll.config

Find the “MashupDefaultPoolContainerMaxCount” setting.

Change its value to the desired value.

Save and restart the gateway.

You will notice that in that file the default value of this setting is ‘0’. This means that it will use the default out of the box mashup engine setting of ‘6’ containers. You can override this default by setting your own value.

Keep in mind that those mashup engine containers require machine resources and will affect your machine’s performance. You will need to strike a good balance between the efficiency you get by running concurrent queries and optimizing the local machine resources those containers use. A recommended ceiling for the maximum number of containers you can use is roughly twice the number of cores in your local machine processor.

Changing this property value to 1 means that all queries will run sequentially, which could be desired for specific data sources that don’t support or don’t perform well with concurrent requests.

Updated version of the mashup engine

Last but not least, this gateway update includes the same version of the Mashup engine as the Power BI Desktop update released earlier this month. This will ensure that the reports that you publish to the Power BI Service and refresh via the gateway will go through the same query execution logic/runtime as in the latest Power BI Desktop version. Note that there are some Beta connectors that are still not supported outside of Power BI Desktop. Please refer to specific connector documentation for more details or contact us if you have any questions.